Astro-Chart for Andrew Demcak
About Lazarus, a Remix:
A note on process:
The poems in this collection are remixes of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel-era poems. Not to worry, these are all original, transformed works – I have not violated any laws regarding copyrighted material – I checked with a lawyer. Plath’s poems still exist – I’ve done nothing to harm them. This is a post-post-post-modern book; it is one big metaphor. I reconstructed the poems for Lazarus, a Remix using the 1960s remix process that William S. Burroughs used in creating such works as The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, among other novels. My process, however, includes additional poetical steps: editing for meaning/subject matter/clarity, an injection of poetic metrical count (making it, at times, closer to blank verse, or French syllabic verse), and/or insertion various rhyme formulae.
Those familiar with the text of Plath’s Ariel will notice that I completed my poem series by remixing and including additional poems Plath wrote during her last year that were not originally collected in Ariel. I took poetic license with some of the poem titles, as well.
When read aloud, these poems reveal their true music.
From the author:
On a personal note, these poems in Lazarus, a Remix are about Recovery. They come directly from my experience with my battle against alcoholism and heroin addiction. I wrote them all while incarcerated in various drug and alcohol rehabs in Northern California. They are document and fever chart. They are a map, a breadcrumb trail, of my journey out of addiction and incomprehensible demoralization and into the beginnings of my sobriety.
Also, HIV rears its ugly head in some of the poems. To have lived and come of age during a pandemic like AIDS was terrible. Survivor’s guilt is real. Imagine all of your heroes and mentors one day disappearing. You have no one to learn from, no one to imitate. It was like witnessing genocide in slow motion.